If the last time you walked into a church was at Christmas or for someone’s wedding, you’re not alone. At least not in New England.

Only 25 percent of Connecticut residents say they attend religious services every week, according to a recent poll — one of the lowest rates in the nation.

Elsewhere in New England, attendance is lower still. In Vermont, only 17 percent said they attend religious services weekly — the lowest rate in the nation — and 71 percent said they attend “seldom or never,” the highest rate in the nation, according to the Gallup poll, which surveyed 177,000 Americans throughout 2014.

New Hampshire's weekly attendance rate was 20 percent, as was Maine's. Twenty-two percent of Massachusetts residents said they went to church every week, and Rhode Island residents claimed the highest rate in New England at 28 percent.

Why is attendance at religious services so low in New England? A number of factors come into play — including competition for our time, the region’s racial characteristics, and the role of church in society, experts said.

One significant reason why Connecticut has one of the lowest rates for church attendance is the state’s religious make-up, said Scott Thumma, a sociology of religion professor at the Hartford Seminary.

Across the country, people who identify as Catholic, liberal Protestant and Jewish are less likely to attend a weekly service, he said. Those three are also the common religious affiliations in Connecticut and throughout New England.

In fact, those three groups make up about 86 percent of the people in Connecticut who adhere to some religious group.

“That has a huge effect,” he said.

New England also has the lowest percentage of evangelical mega-churches, said Stephen Prothero, an author and professor of religion at Boston University.

“Our piety is more likely to be Roman Catholic, people who are going dutifully to mass for 45 minutes. Evangelicals go for three hours.”

New Englanders are also more highly educated, wealthier and whiter, factors that correlate with lower religious participation, Prothero said. “So some of the demographics are going against the way of religious adherence.”

“The groups that are driving church attendance are immigrants, Spanish speaking immigrants, and we don’t have as many as they do in Texas or Atlanta,” Prothero said. “White working class Irish and Italian Catholics are going to church, but Harvard Square professors aren’t going much.”

Race is another factor that impacts religious attendance numbers in a region, Thumma said, especially when comparing New England to the South. As a whole, the African-American population in the U.S. claims a high weekly attendance rate. The African-American population in Connecticut is about 10 percent, and is even lower in northern New England, Thumma said. The population in the South is much higher.

The Deep South, as a region, had the most faithful church-goers in the country. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee all had weekly attendance rates above 40 percent, according to the poll.

The highest rate in the country was in Utah, a heavily Mormon state. Fifty-one percent of residents said they went to church every week, according to the poll.

“There’s all this language about the world becoming flat and cultural differences going away, but the situation is very uneven,” said Prothero.

“We still have places where church attendance is astronomically high as a nation, compared to everywhere in Europe,” Prothero said.

The role that churches once played in the social fabric of the community has changed as well, he said.

“There are other places that people can get the social side of religion, or the social goods that they used to get to a great extent through church — they can get it through other ways, or they think they don’t need it as much. We’re in our laptops and phones more than we used to be, and that doesn’t help churchgoing.”

That’s not to say our spiritual needs have ebbed as a society. Competition for our free time has increased over the years, and church has become less of a priority.

“We didn’t have the Internet, we didn’t have television, we didn’t have soccer on the weekends … it used to be sacrosanct,” he said.

But no longer.

“People are going hiking in Oregon on Sunday mornings. They’re going sailing in Boston. They’re playing video games, or studying for an exam, or preparing for a lecture.” And we’re bringing work home with us on the weekends.

The low numbers in New England also reflect the cultural and societal norms of the region, Thumma said.

“If you’re in the South, there’s a lot more societal pressure,” to go to church, he said. In New England, religious affiliation is often considered a private, personal matter, but in the South there is a “built-in expectation” that a person is religious, Thumma said.

“I lived in Texas and Georgia, and the second question someone asks you after your name is what church you go to,” Thumma said. “I’ve never been asked that in Connecticut and I’m a religion professor.”

“There’s just not the same societal pressures to be committed and to actually attend,” he said.

There are also areas of New England that were really never particularly religious, Prothero said.

“There’s a really strong non-religious part of New England, in the north, especially in northern Maine and northern Vermont,” Prothero said. “Not a lot of churches, not a lot of people, and long traditions of religious dissent. So New England has interesting pockets of non-participation that have been there a long time.”

The number of people who claim to be completely unaffiliated with religion has also increased in recent years, said Mark Silk, director of the Leonard Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. A generation ago, people who were involved in the church as children but did not regularly attend church services as adults were still very likely to claim some sort of religious affiliation, he said. Now that’s not the case.

The numbers are also wildly inflated, experts said. Some estimate that only half of the people who say they go to church every week actually do.

“People say they go to church more often than they actually do,” said Silk.

If 25 percent of Connecticut’s population — about 900,000 people — attended a service each week, then every church in the state would have more than 300 people in it, said Thumma.

“It is an inflated number,” he said. “What they mean is, ‘I’m the kind of person who goes to church every week.’”

The poll surveyed 177,000 Americans throughout 2014, asking participants how often they attended church, synagogue or mosque. The possible responses were: at least once a week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom or never. The poll’s rankings reflect the number of people who responded “at least once a week.”

“The state-by-state variations in church attendance are significant because attendance is a powerful indicator of underlying religiosity, which in turn is related to Americans' views on life, culture, society in general and politics,” according to the report accompanying the poll.